A hundred and happy on Saturday

Mamie Hes, of South Bend, isn't getting out of her chair for anybody on Saturday. "Any guests can serve themselves," she says. "I'll let them wait on me, too." Her family and friends may be falling all over each other to serve Mamie her birthday cake and Neapolitan ice cream. You do that for people who turn 100. "If I knew I was going to live so long, maybe I would have done some things different ... maybe taken better care of myself," Mamie says with a smile. Actually, she isn't doing bad at all. Living in the same house she and her late husband, Stanley, built in 1927, she still is sound of mind and if it wasn't for that darn arthritis in her knees, she would be feeling pretty chipper, too. "For the past couple of years, I haven't gotten beyond my porch," Mamie says. "I'm not moving anyway. I plan to be here when I die. "When I leave this place, it will be feet first." Turning 100 on Saturday is nice, but not a real big deal to her. "I just take it day by day now," she says. "I have a sister-in-law, Lottie Kalicki, who is 92 and trying to catch up with me. But I'm not standing still." Instead, she moves at a slow-but-sure pace, getting around her five-room house with a walker these days. "I almost wish I didn't have a dining room now," she says. "It makes it a long trip from the living room to the kitchen." But on Saturday, that dining room will be filled with goodies and good tidings as others come over to celebrate Mamie's entry into the centenary club. "I do like having company over, but I enjoy my solitude, too," she says. She is never really alone, though. Her little scruffy dog, Trixie, almost blind, provides her with plenty of companionship. "Stanley and I had other dogs -- Spotty, Pierre, Bear were some -- but Trixie is the first dog I ever let up on my bed at night," Mamie says. "That was a mistake. She started down at the one corner, but she is working her way up closer to me." Her Stanley, a South Bend firefighter, died in 1987. They had no children. But her niece, Barb Badur, with help from other family members, makes sure she has everything she needs. People don't seem to mind making a special trip for Mamie. Her hairdresser, Charlotte Karasiak, stops over to do her hair and even her podiatrist, Damian Dieter, makes house calls for her. When motivated, Mamie can still bake up a batch of chocolate chip cookies for her visitors and still makes a pumpkin cake for her great-nephew Dan's birthday every year. "I used to crochet for the Salvation Army, too, and Stan and I always loved to fish," she says. "But one time up on Great Bear Lake, we turned over the boat and fell in the water." She was in her 70s at the time. "They always say your life is supposed to pass before your eyes in situations like that," she says. "But it happened too fast for that to occur for me." Mamie just climbed back into the boat -- as cool as a cucumber. She stopped driving three years ago. "But I still had two years on my license," she says, sounding proud that she knew when to quit. She is not quitting on life, though. "Through the grace of God, I have had a good life," she says. "When my husband died when I was close to 80, I figured I was pretty old then and not going to live much longer." But here she still is. Mamie admits, though, that she isn't going to go out and buy any new furniture at her age. "That's why I just cover them." Mamie, meanwhile, gets ready for her life to cover 100 years -- 79 of those in the same South Bend house. "Yes, sometimes I think back to what they call the good old days," she says. But then, when you are turning 100 and are still feeling pretty spry, every day is a good old day. Bill Moor's column appears on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Contact him at bmoor@sbtinfo.com, or write him at the South Bend Tribune, 225 W. Colfax Ave., South Bend, IN 46626; (574) 235-6072.